Are we going to witness an historical housing price correction amid sharpest rise in unemployment and social tension?...and the minimum you should know in order to protect yourself from this downturn from an economic, stock market and political point of view... with a pinch of humor and sarcasm.

Thursday, 25 June 2009

Finnish GDP Casino Roulette

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in its latest outlook on Wednesday it expected Finland's gross domestic product (GDP) to contract by 4.7 per cent this year and to grow by 0.8 per cent in 2010.

In its previous outlook, made public in December, the OECD had forecast the Nordic country's economy to grow by 0.6 per cent this year and by 1.8 per cent next year.

The Finnish finance ministry said last week it saw the economy shrinking by six per cent this year and growing by 0.3 per cent next year.

...and my barber is predicting a 5.1% GDP growth..and while walking down the street, I asked kindly a grand mother what does she think about the Finnish GDP, she look at her watch and told 4:50 warmly...well I suppose she meant 4,5%....In the meantime, Housing Finland models are as well pretty accurate as there are high tech based - an old mysterious christmas crystal ball that said it will be 3.79%...

The truth is that no one has any possible clue about where the Finnish economy will be in the next 12 month since it mainly depends on how the other economy behave, how healthy are our partners (gosh, our friend swedish are in deep sh**t with their eastern european exposure, the Russians are playing Russian roulette with the Rubble and rely on an unrealistically high oil price in the short term ...) - So highly and tight coupled economical systems, that's what we have in our hand - an architecture that was created with instability at its core - grossly reliant on an ever expanding external demand - an open economy that could slowdown tremendously if the global customer decide to reduce their "surrealist" binge comsumption, and stop pilling up debt as it occured in the past 10 years.

So -1,-2, -3,-4, -5, -6 , it's a bit like the start of the spring summer in finland, no one knows if it's going to be mild or freezing...but one thing is sure after a bottom there is only one direction, it's up...and that time the politicians and economist will congratulate themselves since the recovery is on its way ...hoping that people have forgotten the greed, the corruption, the excess that occured during a period where the normal citizen have had to pay the bigger price ("socialize the losses and capitalize the gain")

PS: note the strategy of the finance minister, you predict a catastrophique number -6% to come back later on in the year saying it's not that bad we have -4% ...which is in fact a catastrophique number - psychology, politics and economics all combine to deceive the mind.

Kiitos to the Anon about the Bilderberg link. It is "nice" to see that Finland is one of the countries that gave and official press release about the event http://www.valtioneuvosto.fi/ajankohtaista/tiedotteet/tiedote/en.jsp?oid=261475 while I couldn't find anything like that for others...